Next Maine GOP Chair

Bottom Line: Think Angus King will pick up Senator Snowe's advocacy of a Balanced Budget Amendment?

Rick

Now that is typical status quo thinking, we'd be lucky to be able to just pay the interest on the money congress has borrowed.

The "budget" cannot be balanced, Snowe and Collins and all their congressional cronies pooched us at least a decade ago. At this point we are just counting the days to insolvency and a complete devaluation of the dollar to zero.

You actually think that Snowe could have saved us, rather than being the cause of it.

Looks like the dissention within the party will continue regardless of who gets the position....

I agree Mr. Reed. All I hear is "we need to unite," "we need to unite," but what is going to unite us? New bosses, same as the old bosses, just different philosophies is NOT going to unite anyone! What we need is something to unite under. Uniting under the platform will be a great start. There will be no unification if we can not at least agree on the platform. Sorry to sound negative, I am just a realist.

1. Pro-life folks need to be okay with Pro-choice folks, and vice-versa. This means we need to stop making it an issue in the primaries.
2. The marriage issue is settled, let's move on
3. RP Foreign Policy stances need to be an accepted viewpoint to have and we need to stop fighting and name calling about it
4. Traditional Conservative Fiscal Policy needs to be accepted by the RP folks as an okay view and the NeoCon name calling needs to go too

The truth be told, the platform does more to divide us than it does to unite us. All of the items mentioned above are part of our platform, yet we continue to argue about them. Just because I do not agree with the entire thing, does not mean I need to form a new party. Those who differ from us, but will work hard to advance our entire organization, must be embraced.

Mr. McCabe, while I appreciate and applaud your suggestions, they do nothing to change one simple fact...the party is divided and nothing in your suggestions will change that. We must first unite the party for the greater good and then move on to winning again. I say this as someone not backing a horse in the race but liking both Beth and Rich (from arms length as I've never met either). Read through the comments here and elsewhere with an unbiased eye and you'll find there is quite a bit of accusation, heresay and negativity that must END NOW.

IMHO if we continue down this path we become the TWINKIE party..standing for what we individually want and not realizing that it ends up costing not just what we hoped to achieve us but others with different views in the party another election opportunity.

As to dead weight - great idea, except who determines who is dead weight - is it by voting record? by attendance> by donations made? Who decides and how do they decide what will be cast off? (Not meant to be sarcastic, but truly a question to be answered)

Dead weight is people who show up once a month to the County meetings and do nothing other than vote.

The dead weight weeds itself out when you start having expectations at meetings. Make the County meetings workshops and the dead weight will take care of itself.

The question posed about how do we unite the party......stop fighting about everything and stop making the divisive issues our starting point for conversation. We will NEVER unite under the banners of abortion and marriage. We will also NEVER WIN under the banners of abortion and marriage. As one of the younger people on this forum, I assure you that those are two issues that most people under the age of 35 care very little about.

We know the content we need. Go to Ryan's presentations to learn about the process. I intend to buy an iPad. All I know about them is that they are like a giant iPhone with no phone in it. I would go to one of Ryan's presentations if I lived down there.

We have somebody with the social networking and hardware skills up here. He is Brian Daugherty of Penobscot County.

I disagree, Ryan. You are generalizing according to bias. Marriage won more votes than Romney.
Look at the Maine legislature.
In 2009, marriage won. Did you and others proclaim it to be a winning issue then?
More than 50% of Americans are now pro-life and the highest gains were among young people.
The problem is not with the issues but in treating the issues as unimportant.

I disagree, Ryan. You are generalizing according to bias. Marriage won more votes than Romney.
Look at the Maine legislature.
In 2009, marriage won. Did you and others proclaim it to be a winning issue then?
More than 50% of Americans are now pro-life and the highest gains were among young people.
The problem is not with the issues but in treating the issues as unimportant.

Well seeing that we are 1 for 1 in the lost column it is easy to see we could be two for two.
The abortion issue is never going to be settled until Roe can be overturned and the issue is placed back onto the states where it should be and where the issue can be
fought over. That in it's self is reason enough to not get hung up on it and gives a wide berth to park it in .
There is ways to deal w/ it party wise they are not easy to come too ,but causing failure is if done wrong.

For that to happen, Ryan, they must go to the polls or take advantage of the very generous opportunities to vote early. The biggest part of our problem is Republican legislator's continuing effort to be bipartisan and please the Democrats. It's an impossible task. Democrats are never satisfied. Independents and some Republicans just stay home when they perceive candidates to be "Republicrats" and there is no difference between the parties.

Come on, Ryan. You know better. There are some 50-60,000 Maine voters that voted for marriage but also voted for Obama. The issue is not the problem. Somehow messaging is missing the mark. You have a lot of good ideas but they get lost when you ignore the truth about so-called "social issues"

Every election cycle, the same misguided song gains popularity blaming the social issues.
How many GOP state senators lost re-election campaigns? How many of those were "social conservatives"?

Bob, I am trying to communicate with you about what I am seeing in the electorate. To be perfectly clear, I am Pro-life and indifferent about the marriage issue.

Let's discuss perspective for a moment. I work with mostly 22-39 year old people in the nuclear industry. I hear everyday how regular folks, not politically or religiously engaged, think about the marriage and abortion issue. Many young people will answer the abortion issue this way, "I would never get one, but I don't think we should be telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies." Those same people claim to be Pro-life, but in reality, that is the original Pro-choice position. On the issue of marriage, the typical answer, "I don't care what people do with their lives, that is their decision, not mine."

Both of those stated positions are growing in popularity, not declining. The perception of what is Pro-life and Pro-choice is changing and Pro-choice people are identifying themselves as Pro-life because THEY wouldn't have an abortion. This is why you have the polls that say more than 50% of Americans are Pro-life, the numbers are wrong.

I am NOT blaming the social issues. I am blaming those who advocate for the social issues by insulting the other side of the argument or those who say a Pro-choice person should go to the Dems or Libertarians if they want to be pro-choice. That is what needs to stop. I am not saying RUN away from the issues, but don't make it such a big deal during the primary season.

Ryan, pissing off half of the Republican Party by treating the Ron Paul people the way they were treated had nothing to do with our losses, eh? I know non Ron Paul people who said screw the Republican Party because of that treatment. Social issues did NOT cause us to lose! Alienating the young Liberty people caused us to lose. Why is that so hard to grasp?

Here again a simple answer to a problem. Along with do not talk about Snow,do not talk about RP either!
If he had an idea that needs support good just leave him out of it to start. Because the minute it is him it is contentious
no matter what ! IMO just what he wanted ! He is done so there should be no more RP people!
Plain and simple if last summer cannot be put to bed it is senseless to do anything else. The convention is done
the delegates are no more etc. etc..

There should be no "Ron Paul People" because there's been NO Ron Paul with any viable chance to win anything for about nine months now...

And by the way, the "Ron Paul People" never represented anything close to "half the Republicans"!

As you'll recall, some 2% of Maine Republicans participated in the state caucuses... and even with the out-of-state Community Organizers like Wallace, Boyer, Brakey, etc doing their best to hijack the process - Ron Paul still LOST.

In fact, Maine was one of his strongest states, and his people did manage to get plenty of kids to the Augusta Convention to take over there - but their credentials never passed the Straight-Face test. They were turned away in Tampa because they were caught.

You Were Found Out, Kids!!! You were not ROBBED... you cheated and got caught. Stop playing "victim;" it's most unattractive!

So please stop crying. Wipe your little noses and get to work. It's much easier to point fingers, cry and whine than it is to build a winning party.

To Brakey and Boyer, I was glad to see the posts you made, but I thought I would just post some questions.
- A couple of months ago, you guys took pictures of everyone in the room at a Cumberland County meeting. People thought afterwards that you were compiling an enemies list of anyone who voted against your motions to support the national delegation, and that you were trying to intimidate people. Why did you take pictures of everyone?
- There are rumors that you guys are going to try to "take over" the party. This would involved taking over towns and forcing out anyone that is not a Ron Paul person, and putting in a County Chairman that would do whatever you told them to do. True or false?
- Why can't you just leave Jan Staples alone? She's not the national committee woman anymore and isn't even on the State committee. Do continued threats and harrassment really serve any purpose except to divide people more?

Rick B.
I have no problem w/ ideas from anyone,my suggestion was just disassociate the name from the ideas and it would be a start.
Please refrain from further hijacking of my suggestion in any form.
Of course forgetting about last summer would be nice also and it would be good if you would just drop the accusations about any group
because as an observer it appears you are doing the same amount of turd stirring as others for what ever reason. Regardless of how correct you might be hat has become a secondary issue w/ you IMO.